I. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to the field of computer graphics and to systems and methods for rendering symbols. More particularly, the present invention relates to computerized systems and methods for rendering text within symbols and graphically modeling processes, such as business processes, using such symbols.
II. Background Information
Many software and consulting companies use tools for strategy, design, implementation and controlling of business processes. A “business process” describes functions or activities that occur in a particular order and that create added value for a company. Since business processes are crucial to performance, companies often spend a significant amount of time and effort to design efficient business processes. Further, in order to efficiently design business processes, many companies use modeling tools. A “modeling tool” may include software and/or other computerized systems that can be used to plan a process. In general, modeling tools may depict, analyze, and optimize business processes. Often times a single tool can be used for modelling different business processes.
Some modeling tools allow users to model a business process in a graphical form using symbols to represent a logical sequence of steps in a process. Many of these tools contain symbols that represent the objects in a model. A user can create and modify models using a toolset built into the modeling tool or provided separately. Each model contains information about which objects and which connections are visualized in that model. For each object, the model stores information about which symbol is used to visualize the object, its position on the canvas, its size, and its style.
One example of a platform for building business processes is the ARIS Platform provided by IDS Scheer AG (Saarbruecken, Germany). The ARIS Platform provides a tool portfolio for designing, implementing, and controlling business processes. Within the ARIS platform is a repository that contains a graph and the nodes within the graph are called objects. The models are graphical representations of parts of the graph. Objects are represented in the models using symbols. A user may use symbols included with ARIS or create symbols of his own using an AMF editor that is part of the ARIS system.
Many users may require small modifications of the default symbols from a modeling tool installer or vendor, or even modified or customized symbols stored in a repository. For instance. the user may need to change one or more attributes or properties of a symbol, such as adding text within the symbol. Further, different text may need to be added to the symbol depending on the instance of the symbol to be rendered.
In prior solutions, if a user wanted to render a symbol with text, the size of the text may be limited since the text may not always fit inside the symbol. As a result, without a size restriction, the text would overlap the boundaries of the symbol. In other solutions, if the text entered by a user did not fit into on line, line breaks or wrapping of the text would be automatically performed to fit the text within the symbol. However, even with these solutions, if the text was too long and did not fit completely into the symbol, the words that did not fit into the symbol would be replaced with “ . . . ” or would otherwise be abbreviated.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for improved systems and methods for generating rendering a symbol, including a symbol with text contained within the boundaries of the symbol. Moreover, there is a need for improved systems and methods for rendering a symbol with text, including the ability to fit as many lines of text as possible into the symbol and to use a minimum number of line breaks.